Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
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When it comes to movies about rich, eccentric, dysfunctional (and white, you can’t forget white) families, one director comes instantly to mind: Wes Anderson. He’s exceptional at exploring broken family dynamics in pictures like Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson’s sometime collaborator, Noah Baumbach, has plumbed the same depths of familial dysfunction, most notably in The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding. The two have worked together in some capacity on Anderson’s Life Aquatic, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Baumbach’s Squid.
Baumbach has returned to this familiar subject matter for his new film, The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), but to a decidedly mixed effect. The movie feels too reminiscent of Anderson’s masterful Tenenbaums, but with none of the emotional connection to the characters, and only a hint of that movie’s wistfulness.
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